The Information and Communications Technology (ICT) panorama is evolving towards more and more distributed computing paradigms in which it is typical for data, content and applications to be managed, stored and accessed in the cloud. There is an increasing use of virtual desktop and other types of remotely managed virtualized IT appliances, and an increasing use of applications designed according to a distributed computing paradigm that rely on continuous connectivity, and that are able to interact with a plethora of other on-line services and data sources.
The separation between local services and applications in execution on a client device, and those that are being provided from a remote location is becoming increasingly blurred, and the prominence of web-based technologies and visual similarities between the design of web-based applications and notional ‘local’ ones has increased the potential for confusion, and can sometimes leave a user with the puzzling doubt about whether the actions he or she is doing are actually happening locally, or whether everything is happening “on the web”, or “in the cloud.”
While this new computing panorama enables new and more collaborative computing scenarios, at the same time it can constitute a threat to users' privacy, particularly whenever the boundary between local and distributed computing becomes fuzzy and confusing. For example, it is becoming increasingly challenging to distinguish whether sensitive information, such as e-mail access credentials (username and password for example) is being delivered to the local computing device, or it is being delivered to some on-line 3rd-party service that will use such information on behalf of the user.
Therefore, in the new and emerging computing panorama, trusted and trustable mechanisms designed to protect users' privacy and privacy-sensitive information, such as access credentials and passwords, but also the whole set of privacy-sensitive information a user is used to collect and have available in the private context of his or her own device is desirable.